Thanks honourable Speaker, Council Whip, Members of the Mayoral Committee, Councillors, abo Ndabezitha, Amakhosi akithi!
would like to take this opportunity to thank all stakeholders, well wishes, our citizens and our hardworking administration led by the dynamic and able Municipal Manager, all our invited, media houses, special greeting to Pastor, cdes and friends, ladies and gentleman.
As we stand on our eleventh day of our women’s month, we pay tribute to the courageous women who fought against colonial and apartheid oppression in our struggle for liberation, freedom and social emancipation.
Today we reassert our commitment to the ongoing battle for gender equality and the dismantling of patriarchy. In unity, women and men must organise themselves in non-racial and non-sexist ways, striving towards complete social emancipation.
This cannot be achieved without the liberation of women, gender equality, breaking the chains of colonial and apartheid legacies, eradication of economic exploitation, overthrowing, imperialism and fighting for a just and peaceful world.
Honourable speaker and all our stakeholders and guests we want to take this opportunity on this important platform to reflect on our going struggle to transform our Local Municipality into an effective tool in the hands of our citizens to chart a better, sustainable and prosperous future for themselves and their future generation.
As one wise man proclaimed in disper, how did we accept the office, how did we see our blue light car as anything but a divergent.
True liberation for any people is their ability to own and work their land, to cloth themselves and determine the structure of the economy that fulfils their current and future needs.
Driven by this consciousness and in pursuance of our 2050 vision and the journey that we have started in 2021 November 24th, we should engender the spirit of collectivism and collective ownership of our city.
We will continue to deepen our philosophy of building a people centred and driven government we commit to doing so with integrity, commitment and be ready to account for our work to our fellow citizens.
This honourable speaker will be achieved through meaningful participation and involvement of citizens in decision making of our local municipality in order to make true the commitment to a people centred and driven institution. (Collaborative governance)
In order to without fear of contradiction call our municipality functional, the strategic engagement and involvement of the masses of our people (using all available communication platforms), should not be considered a by the way issue, instead a pre-requisite to building a city that become a pride of all its citizens.
As part of using technology to improve communication, the municipality has established a WhatsApp portal, which our communities uses to enquire about all service related queries, get their municipal bills and most importantly monitor the responds time which will ensure accountability to our citizens.
When honourable speaker we proclaimed in 2021 that a journey of a thousand miles start with one step, we want to take this moment to thank our MM and his team for making our first step decisive.
That decisive first step entails fulfilling our commitment to improving service provision, our municipality has with a limited budget worked to ensure that a professional, quality and above standard provision of service is provided to our citizens.
As our motto indicated our responds to the aspiration of our people for better services and prompt respond to their queries, is through hard work not explanations and excuses. I want to report to this gathering and all our citizens that our employees has indeed accepted the philosophical swift to transform themselves to be selfless and committed servant of all citizens of our city.( as the saying goes agter os come okke in die kraal), some strugglers will indeed join the our moving train in due course and make the ultimate decision of being true servant of our people.
The best step that our citizen can do in support of their own and all of us development is to join in significant numbers, the societal philosophical swift to take responsibility to making our municipality the best in our country by doing the following citizen’s duties.
1. Let us meet our municipality halve way and pay for the services rendered.
2. Let us not participate in miss use of our resources.
3. Let us keep our communities clean.
4. Let us protect our infrastructure against vandals.
5. Let us be champions of building a thriving economy in our city.
As part of our commitment to improve the quality and standard of service provision in our Local Municipality we have identified five key pillars that we are working on as part of improving the socio- economic environment of our city.
1. Water & Sanitation
2. Roads and storm water
3. Improving environmental resilience and waste management
4. Financial sustainability and viability
5. Socio economic development
1.Water and Sanitation
This is the most urgent and important of the other pillars that we adopted as the municipality. As part of dealing with this source of life for our people, the following key interventions has been initiated;
-The Bundu Weir improvement project.
-the Loskop project.
-The under-ground utilisation project.
+The Bundu weir improvement project.
The municipality is upgrading the Bundu weir water treatment plant from its current 5m litre to 10m litre a day, which will benefit the Kwaggafontein water scheme.
The project which includes building a buster pump in Mathy sen loop will be completed in December 2023.
+The Loskop project
The project is on course to be completed in December 2024, which will benefit mostly areas within the Verena water scheme and bring into our water system 20m litre a day when fully operation.
+The under-ground utilisation project
As part of augmenting the water short fall in our system we have embarked on a programme to ensure that under-ground water is used optimally in mostly farm areas and where quality high yield is found in the municipality.
The Moloto under-ground programme is one of our most important intervention due to its potential to yield up to 3.5m litres a day when fully operational.
Sanitation provision
Due to the challenge of water availability, water borne sewer is currently unsustainable and alternative sanitation technologies will be considered as per need and environmental considerations.
2. Road and storm water
The municipality has developed a long term plan on ensuring mobility and usability of our roads and streets.
>The important phase of this programme is to pave all main roads and critical streets going to school, clinic, cemeteries, churches and streets going to traditional areas.
> The will go simultaneously with our street regraveling programme in order to reduce the current backlog of many kilometre of unusable roads in our municipality.
>as part of ensuring that all our tarred roads are not a hazard for motorist in the municipality, we have embarked on a programme to eradicate pothole by the end of the financial year and from the onwards a 48hours responds time will be adhered too.
>the storm water programme to minimize the damage to our road will be implement in term of our storm water master plan.
3. Improving environmental resilience and waste management
The municipality started a campaign in October 2022 to keep our city clean, through the cleaning of all dump site.
In order to ensure that this illegal dumping is curd the municipality has initiated a programme to ensure that on a bi-weekly basis the municipality collect refuse in all our communities.
As part of capacitating the unit dealing with waste management two compactor trucks, two skip loader trucks and 40 skip bins has being bought to ensure that an effective waste collection programme is implemented
As part of involving our community in keeping our municipality clean we have assisted over 100 waste pickers with relief funding and personal protective equipment through the department of forestry, fisheries and environment.
4. Financial sustainability and viability
As part of confidence building by the municipality and ensuring prudent usage of public funds the following will be targeted for eliminating:
-unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure
-building internal capacity to eliminate outsourcing ( usage of consultants).
The municipality further commits itself to working towards the attainment of a clean audit outcome in order to build a culture of ethical and moral behaviour buttressed by professional conduct by our administration.
The revenue collection has improved to 22% which is still a challenge, as part of improving our collection rate a revenue enhancement indaba was held in April 2023, amongst the key issues raised was that the municipality should attend to the matter of accurate billing, and which
our administration is will attend to through data cleansing project which will help to reflect the accurate amount that each household should pay.
5.Socio economic development
This pillar is fundamental to us achieving a well thought spatial development plan anchored on a thriving economy based on our key economic nodal points, key amongst them is the establishment of the central business district.
For the municipality to transit from being a peri-urban into a modern city, the municipality has embarked on a programme to formalize all our settlements and issue all households with title deeds.
As part of streamlining development in the municipality we have earmarked on the following developments:
>Mbubuma Earn Hub.
>KwaMhlanga Mix-Use Development.
>Khazamula Mix-Use Development.
>Verena Smart City.
Approach to revitalising our economy
As part of stimulating economic development and growth, the municipality is using the process of acquiring goods and services that we need for our operation as part of developing local businesses.
As part of transforming our service provider data base we will continue to encourage the participation of women, people with disability and young people in order to ensure that our budget continue to be a catalyst of economic empowerment, where business opportunities are available for all entrepreneurs.
We further have budgeted 5m to assist our SMMEs with financial and non-financial support ( particularly those who are focus on manufacturing commodities).
Working with the department of economic development and tourism the municipality is reviving the Kwamhlanga Show to showcase different businesses in all sectors.
Further economic initiative will include signing of new social labour plans with our mining houses which will focus on infrastructure and local economic development.
As part of reviving our tourism sector we are continuing the engagement department of economic development and tourism to restore Zithabiseni resort to its former glory and act as an anchor for places like Mabusa game resort and the Esther Mahlangu route, so that local B&Bs can benefit on tourist visiting these areas.
Thembisile is a city of brilliance, in the art, culture and sport
1. Let us support all sporting codes.
2. Let us support art and culture activities.
As part of supporting this initiative of art, culture and sport, the municipality will continue to build different sporting facilities in our localities e,g the revamp of Kwamhlanga and Kwaggafontein stadiums.
We need a city that is vibrant and active in order to move our young people from all social ills.
The other aspiration that we will continue to support and participate in is the matter of making Thembisile Hani a center of academic excellence.
We urge all our stakeholder in the education sector to triple their effort to ensure that an African Child get the best education to lay a strong foundation for their path to success (and most instance away from poverty and hopelessness).
Our pursued for a TVET college should continue with the support all stakeholders. We should cultivate a culture of developing artisans in the municipality for skilling our youth and creating a service industry based on artisanal skills.
The municipality will continue to celebrate academic excellence through our annual academic awards through the office of the executive mayor.
We believe that businesses in our Local Municipality are good corporate citizen. As part of rebuilding our economy we encourage our business community to work with our local municipality in order to
zone and place business according to our special development plan and our corridor development programme.
We further call on our business to take a lead to ensure that we have a financially sustainable municipality through payment of their services.
We further call on our business to take a lead in skill development through internships and mentoring for our young professional.
>Honourable speaker there are two important highlight that I should mention at this stage
The biggest applause should go to abo Ndabezitha for the progressive step they took working with the municipality in signing the memorandum of agreement in order to ensure that we have a properly planned spatial development in the municipality and reduce the challenge of land invasion which leads to our people being put in areas that are not suitable for human settlement.
As part of building confidence in the operations of our institution, we are going to work hard in the 2023/24 financial year that achieve a clean audit, so that our people know that their taxes that they gave us a responsibility to use for their socio-economic development of their city are accounted for and used for all that are for their collective interest.
The biggest challenges of our time facing our people is the issue of electricity security and lack of Batho Pele approach is serving our people.
The lack of empathy by Eskom in attending to our people’s complaints reminds me an observation ones made in times of disper
”A bad attitude is like a flat tire, you can’t move until you remove it”.”
It is about time that we as citizens of Thembisile Hani Local Municipality takes a lip of faith and start a process of applying for a licence to reticulate and manage the distribution of electricity in our city.
In conclusion honourable speaker it will be befitting durng this women month honour one the stalwart Mme Sharlote Maceke, one of the exemplary mother, activist, leader who made the apartheid regime to sit up and taken women struggles in this country seriously and say Ingama la Makhozikazi.
Finally honourable speaker; As Frantz Fanon proclaimed: Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.
As this generation we must change the narrative by our detractors that all we can do is to destroy everything we come across, and build as city of responsible citizens whose commitment to a better life for all is unflinching, an investment for future generations.
Transformation of our municipality into a city (just to paraphrase utate uMandela it is in our hands.
Thank you, Ngiyathokoza, Kea leboga !!!